MR 080: Time Works

Ah, now is this more like it. An actual good story that's not mean spirited and hateful towards time travel as a concept. And yet uses time travel as a key part of the story. It's just so refreshing to not hear the Doctor talk about how he has to kill everyone in this society to preserve the timeline. It's wild that I would even have to say that huh?

I will mention just real quick that I found the dialogue to be a bit hokey. I know that it's an audio drama, so it's necessary that you have to narrate what's happening so the audience knows, but it's kind of in your face in this one. There's a lot of physical movement that has to be explained. Charley in particular seems to be saddled with most of this dialogue for some reason.

Anyway, we do a bit of running around in a frozen world, ala Chimes of Midnight for an episode before the plot can really get going. I'm not a huge fan of this apparently trope at this point. It reminds me of the first episode of Mind Robber where they just run around for a bit before the TARDIS explodes. It doesn't really add a whole lot to the story in my mind. It does get the Doctor back a few minutes before Charley and C'Rizz which, again, doesn't really amount to a whole lot. The main thing is adds to the story is that the characters get to see... the clockwork men.

Mostly this is a classic Doctor Who overthrows a tyrannical government story. Most of the time is spent in the society just watching what's happening. It's a society entirely built on keeping the great "project" going. Everyone's time is catalogued. Anyone not working for a single second is considered a "time waster" and risks being "downsized," their euphemism for being killed. Nowadays, corporations use the phrases "time theft" and "quiet quitting" for things like this. You're standing there on the clock talking to your coworkers for five minutes? That time not working adds up, must be a "time thief."

We see a series of vignettes about what's happening. The Doctor encounters a bin man going about collecting the trash. Then he encounters someone working in a market stall. They don't seem keen on talking to him because he's wasting their time just by talking and asking them questions. I'm so curious why there are even market stalls at all in the first place. How do people have time to go and buy food? Or to eat? They work all day, sleep, and then come back to work some more. All they are is work and sleep, only because it's a biological necessity. If sleep was not biologically required, they would be required to work constantly until they collapse of exhaustion and die. We all know that's what would happen in our own world if that was the case.

The stall owner helps the Doctor who gets in to meet the king. The king is nervous about what is happening. His son is the "idle prince," he doesn't work like the others, but is not downsized. The king is not really in charge, you see. "In between the tik and the tok," as they say, anyone can be downsized at a moment's notice. One second someone is standing there and the next they are gone, disappeared from time entirely. And everyone carries on as if this was perfectly normal and right that they would disappear. They must have been a time waster. If they're not being efficient they deserved it. We need to replace them with someone who WILL BE efficient.

The Doctor already knows what is happening. The clockwork men exist in between the seconds of time. They walk through while everything is frozen and disappear whoever they like before going away and time restarting. Everyone lives in fear of being disappeared at any moment, driving them to work harder lest they too be downsized. The king fears this too. But his son does not work. He does not fear being disappeared because the king has no other children. If the clockwork men were to kill the prince, there would be nobody to take the king's place. Thus the prince is in a unique position to find out what is happening and try to stop it.

The stall owner's brother helps cover for her despite believing it is wrong. He's fully bought into the propaganda, yet he gets downsized for helping his sister who is now on the run. Meanwhile Charley and C'Rizz are brought in for their "job interviews" to see where they could best help advance "the project." C'Rizz gets to meet the source of all this. The "figurehead." It's just an AI, because of course it is. It's so prescient. This is always where corporate culture is going: an AI managing the numbers, making them as efficient as possible. It uses its "organic resources," i.e. the people, to maximize efficiency. All of life is efficiency. It then sends out the clockwork men to downsize anyone who isn't efficient enough.

The previous inhabitants of this planet created this AI to try to save their society when it was on the brink of collapse. It has been many things since. An architect. An innovator. Even a general. It makes me think about what a dystopian tyrannical society based around those traits would have been. Now it is an accountant, managing the spreadsheets to make sure everyone is working. Counting up all the time theft and cutting back on the least efficient resources. It gives C'Rizz a job in the office and downsizes someone else who it thinks won't be as efficient as him. Before Charley can go for an interview, though, it identifies the Doctor as a threat and turns the entirety of the world against him.

Not only can these clockwork men kill someone in between time, they can also implant ideas and suggestions in people's minds, propaganda, that it's up to them to accept or not. The Doctor responds by activating a device that stops all devices that interfere with time in the radius, something he says is mostly used for protection for people working in the time vortex. The result is that the clockwork men are now visible. Everyone sees them. Everyone sees the things that have been keeping them under thumb this whole time. And that's the source of the revolution.

Some people bow down to the clockwork men, seeing them as gods. While some attack them, having lived in fear all their lives. The Doctor gets to see Figurehead which tells the Doctor that it's just there to maximize efficiency. How long with it keep the people enslaved? Until they master space flight? Until they conquer the galaxy? What's the point? Why are we even doing this? To advance society, the Figurehead responds.

It's a meditation on this grand notion of civilization. Civilization exists to advance. There is a straight line from A to B where humanity gets better, technology gets better, we all evolve as a society. This grand myth of history. Civilization is just a game of tech trees. You advance along the tech trees and get a better society as a result. And eventually, one day, we'll reach the end of that tech tree, the end of society, where we've reached the pinnacle of humanity. A lot of video games use this notion. Games like Civilization or Grand Strategy games like those made by Paradox are all about this idea. Indeed, there was a lot of talk about "the end of history" when the Soviet Union fell. Yet history continues and there is no real point to it. It's a narrative of grand design. This is why we are on the Earth. An attempt to give meaning to the chaos.

Naturally, as the arbiter of chaos, the Doctor shuts it all down. He turns off the great clock that has been looming over their society for generations. It stops. Time stops. The work stops. The project stops. The grand game of civilization stops. And the clockwork men stop. They see no future in which they will be needed so they don't resist as they are taken apart. And finally, work without end comes to a close. There is finally time for other things in life besides work.

I quite enjoyed it. I usually like overthrowing totalitarian dictatorships like this, depending on what the dictatorship is about. And here it's about a corporate structure maximized towards the grand narrative of "progress" for the sake of it. That's all we are. Cogs in a machine of progress and efficiency. Shut down the machine. Break the wheel. While the narrative was a tad convoluted and at times it was a bit tricky to know what was happening, it was still good. It could have benefited from perhaps a couple more re-writes to tighten up the script and, as usual with these two hour stories, could have been cut down to an hour or hour and a half. Still, what is here is quite good.

The Monthly Adventures #80 - "Time Works" by Steve Lyons

Between this and Conundrum, Steve Lyons is really rising in my ranks as a writer at the moment. After the one-two punch of Pier Pressure and then Night Thoughts, this immaculately scripted, intelligent wildfire of a story felt like an absolute breath of fresh air. Discovering that this was originally written for the Divergent Arc isn’t a surprise at all and it’s honestly a shame it wasn’t placed there: this is the experimentalism it desperately needed and only occasionally shined through. A techno-gothic epic with some truly enrapturing world building and direction that could’ve used a little tightening up around the edges.

The world of Industry runs clockwise, and in between the tick and the tock, the Clockwork Men come to take you away. Landing in a world that operates by the hand of a great clock, the Doctor uncovers a great conspiracy between the turning cogs.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This is the sort of story we need more of; blazingly experimental, unabashedly weird and daringly high concept with some utterly breathtaking imagery to boot. We are landed in the most alien of sci-fi premises that grips the premise of the show and uses it like intended, this feels like a story that belongs nowhere else other than Who. But why is that? Well to begin with, I think this might have my favourite setting from The Monthly Adventures so far. The stunningly realised world of Industry operates under one of the most ingenious ideas ever put to the show: the whole thing is scheduled, a great clock watching over the city. Everybody must do their job to the tick of the clock, or they will be swept away between seconds. This sumptuous location is complete with a fantastic mix of regal and sci-fi decorations, with medieval peasants walking around with watches and smartphones. The decaying, gothic leanings complete the palpable atmosphere that shroud the story and this marauding sombreness of a society locked in its way is stitched into every facet and every face of the script.

And in fleshing out the world, Lyons reveals one of his greatest strengths: the characters. With a relatively narrow focus, Lyons uses a top cast to deepen his script in a sprawling way. We get a taste of the everyday world with the rebellious Vannit and her cowardly brother Revnon and a taste of the elite with the King and his heir: Kestorian and Zanith, who both excel, Kestorian as the bitter and duty-ridden ruler and Zanith as the shallow but good natured prince, hated by his people for the freedom he wishes to share with them. At a point, it stops feeling like Doctor Who and more like some great fantasy epic, I wouldn’t be surprised to find these two at the heart of a thousand-word door stopper. Our main characters are also pretty great too, even if C’rizz feels a little sidelined.

It is of my opinion that this is one of the most polished stories the Main Range has delivered so far, everything feels so on point and perfectly crafted. Props to Lyons for using expository narration in a way that actually really serviced the story, making it feel like a gothic fairy tale told by firelight. Although, the tone and immersion probably wouldn’t work quite as well without the absolutely sensational score from Andy Hardwick, whose mournful strings capture a sombre melancholy perfectly. And topping off this skillful construct is the idea itself; I find that when a story centres itself on a really unique idea, it can sometimes fail to realise it, what with trying to juggle the usual tenets of the story as well as the concept. Here, Lyons makes complete use of his idea in such a glorious way. The different forms of time manipulation and how they’re used in the story is brilliant: from the mechanics of the time freeze, to the different aspects of the Clockwork Men; there’s one really great scene where a character is erased from time from the perspective of people who can’t see the time freeze, his sentence being cut off by his erasure; it’s a real “oh, f**k!” moment that was perfectly built up beforehand. It’s little details like these that really complete Lyons’ world.

However, if I really had to isolate one positive about Time Works, this is just a good script. It’s a really solid rise and fall of action that juggles a lot of things expertly, we have time jumps and time loops and scenes happening out of order and somehow, through some crafty dialogue and an immaculate pace, it never feels confusing. A fantastic hook leads into a greater mystery that moves with a brilliant momentum plotted perfectly throughout. Well, almost. Time Works would be a lot higher in my estimations if it wasn’t for the last couple parts because for as much as I love what this story does and how the first half operates, I think it begins to lose that wondrous sense of originality that makes it so special. Remove all the bells, whistles and mystery and the story actually isn’t all that special. A computer built to restructure a broken society has become obsessed with time and efficiency and now governs a city with the use of the past, the present and the future. It’s a pretty simple underdog revolution story that Doctor Who has been doing since its second ever serial, just with some incredible world building put on it. This isn’t saying it’s bad, it just means the story slowly loses that awe it had at its beginning as it slowly reveals itself to be quite a simple affair. And honestly, I found the ending underwhelming. The Doctor makes a single speech and then very easily quickly incites revolution: I never really like when the Doctor manages to change something like an entire societal structure in a short amount of time because it makes the world feel so small and unthreatening, which is a complaint ten times worse in a story that relies entirely on its world. Also, even though the beginning managed to juggle all its plot threads relatively well, the final part does begin to get pretty muddled, with a lot of things happening at the same time.

Time Works is one of the most brilliantly original stories that has come out of The Monthly Adventures and a real showcase of what you can do with the show. A beautiful world, fantastic ideas and some really good execution are used in conjecture with a surprisingly generic story that’s overshadowed by the depth and complexity of its background. Truly sublime stuff that could have used the same amount of care in its plot as it did with its world.

8/10

Pros:

+ Absolutely gorgeous world building

+ Characters feel alive and complex

+ Makes brilliant use of a brilliant idea

+ One of the most evocative soundtracks from the Main Range so far

+ Dynamic script with a fantastic momentum to it

Cons:

- Plot begins to lose steam towards the end

- Things become a little too convoluted for their own good

Have you ever felt like your only worth as a person is based in your productivity? If so you'll probably get something out of this.

This story takes the phrase "time is money" to the next level. They count every second like their life depends on it and can't be found wasting time.

The people at the top are no better or useful than the people at the bottom, and everyone is just a cog in the machine. You are irrelevant, they just want your time.

Can you tell this audio made me think about work?

The king is a pawn in a scheme of something greater. The prince is petulant and power hungry. The villians can stop time and even erase you from it. (If I remember correctly.)

It's been a few years since I've listened to this audio, sorry. I just wanted to jump at the chance to be the first to review it.